Picture courtesy of Heritage Center, IIT Madras. Picture taken on 15, July 1966, at the inauguration of Alakananda Hostel at IIT, Madras Janaki Seshadri is to the immediate left of Ujjal Singh, Governor of Tamil Nadu.
Janaki was a student of Church Park Presentation Convent where J. Jayalalithaa, former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, was her senior. On campus, Usha Rangan of Rishi Valley School joined her. They were the first tech women to join the institute’s coveted five-year BTech program.
On July 30, 2019, IIT-M, renowned for its engineering education, turned 60. Thanks to the progressive leadership at the institute, the young women never felt out of place. The professors on the 15-member interview panel made me feel comfortable, Janaki recalls. She picked Civil Engineering as her major. (Usha would opt for Electrical Engineering.) There were just two of them in a batch of over 200 men. Their classmates took a couple of days to get used to the “intruders” in their midst, but after that things improved, Janaki wrote in the student magazine Campastimes.
In a curriculum designed to keep students on their toes, workshop week would alternate with lecture week. The women entered the machine shop, wore khaki coats over their half-saris, and picked up the tools of carpenters, welders, and fitters. Janaki recalls light-heartedly that the models they created that first week were far less impressive than the blisters and bruises on their hands. Their skills got better and prepared them for what lay ahead. “Working in a plant is quite different from coding in an air-conditioned office and being a software engineer,” Janaki says.
There were weekly periodicals and all these scores counted towards the final grade. Makeup exams and take-home exams were unheard of. When Janaki had a bout of hepatitis, she took an exam in the warden’s office. She wrote her answers in a daze and was surprised to find that she had topped the class in that subject.
Life on the verdant campus was also fun. They biked on the traffic-free avenues. On Saturdays, they enjoyed watching English films at the open-air theater under the night sky. Janaki recalls watching Lawrence of Arabia, To Sir With Love, and Dr. Zhivago. It was always English films. For a hostel day function, Janaki and Usha sang the duet “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” and won a prize for it.
On Sundays, Janaki went home to her family in Gopalapuram. Her father was a physician and her older sister was in medical school. “Why did your parents let you go to that college in the forest?” a grand aunt, would ask with concern. “Who will ask for your (blistered) hand in marriage?”
Overall, the women in Janaki’s family were progressive. As a girl Janaki says she would follow her maternal grandmother around like “Mary’s little lamb.” The elder Janaki drove a car, dropped her lawyer husband at the High Court on workdays, and often took the grandchildren on outings. Janaki’s mother, a soft-spoken, artistically inclined woman, kept the books for her physician husband. Janaki’s mother loved mathematics, a passion she appears to have passed on to her second daughter.
Coming to America
Janaki found her soulmate in Narasimhan Raghupathi, an engineer from Bombay’s Institute of Chemical Technology who was in the PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1971, she transferred her credits to the same school in the U.S., and she did a Masters’ in structural engineering. Busy with her new life, she lost touch with her old friend Usha.
In her first job, Janaki worked for an engineering firm in Pittsburgh. Later both husband and wife found employment with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. When she interviewed for the job – she told the hiring manager that she was pregnant with her first child though she was not showing yet. He liked her forthrightness. “I guess I could think of you as a summer intern,” he said, and gave her the job. Janaki worked at the automaker’s for nearly five years, where she enjoyed using state-of-the-art computers in the design process. Then they moved back to their hometown in the US.
In the 1970s, Indian professionals in the Pittsburgh area came together to build a Hindu temple in their new hometown. As a structural engineer, Janaki worked on the design and layout of the temple facilities; as a believer she was involved in the rituals. The landmark temple, consecrated in 1977, became a community center for Hindus. Whenever the temple staff needed assistance to navigate the American system, Janaki volunteered to help. She was even there at the birth of their American children because their wives needed an interpreter. “These women too call me Amma because, I was a stand-in for their mother,” says Janaki.
For nearly four decades, Janaki worked full-time with Westinghouse, a Pittsburgh-based company whose technology is the basis for nearly half of the world’s commercial nuclear power plants. She designed nuclear plants. She clambered up ladders, crawled into pipes, and checked the innards of reactors to find issues which could turn into big problems if not caught on time.
Earlier in her career, Janaki was an outsider in a white man’s world. “There really weren’t that many homegrown female American engineers either,” she says. So, she took people’s reservations in her stride, advanced in her career and, before long, she was helping train young entrants to the field.
Now a retiree and a grandmother, Janaki still has an active social life. But she is not a big user of social media. So, I volunteer to poke around to find her old friend, Usha Rangan. I report back to say that there is a person by that name on Facebook, about the right age, but “she doesn’t really look like an engineer.” Gently, Janaki admonishes me. There is no such thing as a person who looks like an engineer.
There was no women’s hostel on campus in 1966. Apart from the tech women, there were female graduate students studying one of the pure sciences. There was no female faculty yet.
Because there was no girls’ hostel, all sixteen of the women took residence in the staff quarters and, later, at the top floor of the hostel meant for Central School students. Food would arrive at mealtimes from the mess of the men’s hostel – mostly on time.
In 2019, there are four hostels for women on the IIT Madras campus: Sarayu, Sabarmathi, Sharavathi, and Tunga. There are nearly 2000 women on campus of which close to 300 women are B.Techs. Approximately ten percent of the faculty are women.
